


This is New

by JJK



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Fandom
Genre: 4th Year, Correcting Canon, M/M, Star Gazing, Summer Holidays, Young Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-29 13:07:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7685737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JJK/pseuds/JJK
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“I’m glad you’re here,” Albus said quietly. This time last year he could barely talk about Scorpius in front of his parents, let alone ask to invite him round.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> An epilogue to The Cursed Child where Scorpius stays over at the Potter's for a week in the summer holidays, after a strange and eventful Fourth Year at Hogwarts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is New

**Author's Note:**

> I read the play last weekend and it’s...interesting to say the least. There are many plots points I’m not sure about, but my main problem was the ‘straightwashing’ (if that’s the correct terminology?) of the two main characters, and in particlar that ending... Well. Here’s my attempt to rectify things slightly, in my own version of an epilogue to the play.

The sun was long set but the air remained a stifling 25°C. Albus tossed and turned, endlessly rotating his pillow to try and find the non-existent cold side. The charm his mother had placed on the window generated a soft breeze that circulated the air around the room, but it failed to cool him down; succeeding only in sending waves of warm oppressive air passing over him. His fingers twitched for his wand, wondering if he might be able to add to the spell. A jet of cold water, perhaps, but he resisted. It was forbidden to use magic outside of school and would remain so for another two years. Although he knew that ministry would be unable to discern his magic use from his parents, his mum would know, and she wouldn’t be happy.

“Can’t sleep?” came a welcome voice through the lavender tinged gloom. It was as dark as it ever got in the height of summer, with the windows thrown open in a vain attempt to entice the cold air into the room.

“No,” Albus replied, sitting up to find Scorpius wide awake on the camp bed across the room.

“Me either.”

“It’s too bloody hot.” Albus declared, running a hand through his thick dark hair that was beginning to tuft together with sweat. “I need a drink, want one?” he clambered out of bed, his feet relishing the relatively cool feel of hardwood beneath his toes.

“Won’t your parents mind?” Scorpius whispered through the gloom. At home he’d never dream of venturing out of bed at night to go anywhere other than the bathroom. It simply wasn’t done.

“’course not.”

Scorpius followed Albus downstairs with trepidation. The floorboards squeaked in protest at their footsteps, but the rest of the household remained unperturbed.

Albus didn’t bother to turn the lights on in the kitchen, navigating his way across the polished floor by memory. The kitchen faced east and already a soft warm glow was building under the horizon with the faint promise of dawn. Albus fetched two glasses down the cupboard and filled them under the tap, passing the first to Scorpius and gulping down the second. Though now hydrated, he found he was still far too hot.

“Let’s go outside,” he suggested to Scorpius’ amazement. Their night-time excursions at Hogwarts were always initiated before they went to bed; venturing outside after waking up in the middle of the night made the whole thing seem more daring.

Albus abandoned his cup on the countertop and picked up a sleek black rectangle. He unlocked the backdoor and stepped out into the early morning.

The Potters lived in a pleasant country house that was neither cottage nor manor house but somewhere vaguely in between. Its red bricked walls stood proudly under a terracotta tiled roof, with a smattering of white wooden windows peering out onto the surrounding fields and a trail of ivy creeping beneath the eaves. A winding gravel driveway set the house back from the A-road that would take you into the nearby sleepy home-county village, and a dense copse of trees at the bottom of the garden provided the perfect cover for a game of quidditch.

It wasn’t the first house Harry and Ginny had lived in – there’d been the dingy studio flat two streets from Diagon Alley when they’d first graduated, the two-up-two-down terraced house near Holyhead after they were married and where James and Albus had been born – but this the first home that was truly theirs. It was clear that Harry had well and truly graduated from under the stairs, and Albus had heard him declare that he felt more at home in that house that he ever had before, even at Hogwarts.

It was the only home Albus had ever known. He’d seen pictures of him bouncing and gurgling on his mum’s knee in some foreign living room, but they moved when we was two and he couldn’t visualise anything that he hadn’t seen in photographs. He knew he was lucky, but sometimes he’d felt forced into a sense of over gratitude, and guilt at what he’d been given. The constant, unintended reminders of how his life differed from his parents – how he always had enough food, that the den in the corner of his room was bigger than Harry’s space under the stairs had been, how he never had to endure hand-me-downs or unfair chores – had irritated Albus to no end growing up. He knew his parents meant well, but he’d never asked to be born in a lap of luxury. Sometimes, especially before last year, he’d been overcome with an inexplicable desire for hardship.

Albus trooped across the dew-damped grass which sloped away from the house towards the trampoline which was nestled on a flat patch of lawn. Untamed grass grew messily underneath it where not even the charmed lawn mower could be bothered to reach. As they approach a little potato like creature scurried out from the long grass and into the night. The odd mix of muggle and magic had always amused Albus, and as for Scorpius, well his mother might have been accepting of muggles and muggle-born but that didn’t mean she had found any use for their technology. Since Scorpius had arrived the day before, introducing him to the alien muggle artefacts around the house, namely the microwave, the TV, the xbox and laptops (not to mention the radiators and the washing machine) had proved an endless source of entertainment.

Albus scrambled onto the trampoline and lay back on the accommodating elastic material, his knee cocked and his eyes to the stars. Scorpius followed suit, a little more wobbly, but less unsure of the trampoline than he had been that morning.

“Much better,” Albus sighed. It was still hotter than night time had any right to be, but it felt less stifling stretched out under the stars.

“I could get use to this,” Scorpius said with a contented hum. “It’s official, we need trampolines at Hogwarts.”

“When we eventually find the room of requirement, I know what I’m asking for,” Albus agreed.

“I saw we redouble our efforts when we get back,”

“Definitely.”

Although his dad had helpfully told Albus to look out for the many secret passageways and hidden secrets Hogwarts had to offer, he declined to share their locations; claiming it would be more fun for Albus – and the others – to find them on their own.

Although stumbling across a shortcut behind a tapestry at the end of last year had been an unexpected delight, the fact that it halved Albus’ route to the library and avoided a particularly annoying staircase which seemed to have a vendetta against him, made him wish he’d know about it much, much sooner.

“Hey! Shooting star!” Scorpius gestured wildly to the sky.

Albus flicked his gaze to where Scorpius was pointing. “Nah, that’s a satellite.” He said of the tiny white dot tracking too quickly across the sky to be a plane.

“Are you sure?”

Satellites had cropped up in the conversation about the TV, Scorpius had grasped the concept with surprising ease. Even Albus – who had grown up with a healthy dose of muggle science fiction in his life – still couldn’t quite understand how they all worked.

“Pretty sure. Here—” he unlocked his phone and opened the night-sky app and passed it over to Scorpius “—I wanted to show you this,”

“What is it?”

“An iphone – like a mini laptop and phone combined. It’s how muggles communicate with one another, but you can also play games on it.” Teddy had given it to him for his previous birthday as a means of instant communication. He’d said it was to avoid having a bunch of owls following him round which might disrupt whatever covert operation he was running, but Albus knew it was Teddy’s way of making sure Albus knew he was never alone, and that he always had someone to talk to in case he tried to embark on another hair brained scheme like he had last autumn.

“And it has these apps,” Albus continued, “that let you do really cool stuff,” he directed Scorpius to hold the phone towards the sky. Scorpius marvelled at the star map which tracked his movements in real time, displaying a highly detailed map of the cosmos, replete with constellations, planets and satellites whizzing around.

“Ursa Major,” he whispered, tracing the outline of the great bear, he laughed, “Draco,” as he panned around. “You know this would really helpful in astronomy,” he mused.

“’cept it doesn’t work at Hogwarts.”

“How come?” Scorpius still had his eyes glued to the screen.

“I don’t know, it just glitches, goes haywire.” He shrugged. He had to trek to the farthest end of hogsmede to get it to work – which he doubted Teddy had realised when he gave Albus the phone. Not that it had really mattered. After the catastrophe at the start of the year, Albus had come to realise he wasn’t quite so lonely or outcast as he’d once fancied himself to be.

Scorpius made to hand the phone back, but Albus guided his hand to point it south – towards the cluster of stars around Antares. The scorpion was barely visible above the horizon in real life, but the constellation blazed in full glory on the phone screen, with Saturn and Mars nestled in amongst the stars.

“I always thought it was a stupid name when I was younger,” Scorpius admitted.

Albus didn’t blame him. He remembered the trouble he had with his own name, trying to spell his middle name and enduring taunts from the local muggle primary school.

“But now, I kind of like it, I guess.”

“The Scorpion King,” Albus teased affectionately.

“Could be worse,” Scorpius handed the phone back with a smile. “My middle name could be Severus,”

“Yeah, like that’s worse than _Hyperion,”_

They burst into laughter, causing the trampoline to shake beneath them. Suddenly a real shooting star arched overhead. The boys gasped, and pointed instinctively yelping to point it out to each other.

“Now _that_ was a shooting star,” Albus said. He brought his hand down and laid it on the trampoline closer to Scorpius’ than he had intended. Their fingers brushed, and Albus was surprised to find Scorpius entwining their hands together. “This is new,” he said softly. “Do we hold hands?”

Scorpius gave Albus’ hand a slight squeeze in response, which Albus returned, more than happy to keep their hands interlocked. It felt strangely comfortable. He settled back into the trampoline and shuffled round slightly so his head was pressed gently against Scorpius’ shoulder.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Albus said quietly. This time last year he could barely talk about Scorpius in front of his parents, let alone ask to invite him round.

“Me too.” Scorpius gave Albus’ hand another gentle squeeze. “It’s been an odd year,” he said, echoing Albus’ thoughts. “Do you ever wonder if we’re really back in the right timeline?”

“I was worried for the first few months – when you went chasing after Rose,” Albus laughed, only half joking.

Scorpius flushed, embarrassed by the memories. He’d misread the rush of joy at seeing Rose restored to her correct timeline and realising that they hadn’t been responsible for wiping her from existence, for something more like an infatuation. Not helped by the fact that he thought he _ought_ to fancy Rose. She was beautiful and intelligent and fiercely independent, he’d always felt like he ought to fancy her. But after repeatedly asking her out had turned into a running joke, Scorpius began to worry what might happen if she actually said yes. Entering their fourth year there suddenly seemed to be a greater distinction between the boys and girls in their classes, and after more and more couples were given detention for being caught in the boat house, behind the greenhouses or forcefully extracted from broom cupboards on the fourth floor, Scorpius began to realise that ‘going out’ had more meaningful implications that just being a phrase that was tossed around and gossiped about. He also began to realise that he really didn’t want to end up in a broom closet with Rose. That in fact…

Albus had begun to rub soft circles with him thumb against the side of Scorpius’ finger.

“Do you think all of those alternate universes still exist somewhere?” Albus asked, shattering Scorpius’ train of thought.

He couldn’t bring himself to answer; remembering the Augurey and shuddering.

“But what about other alternate universes, happy ones? What if there’s a reality where Voldemort never even existed? Or,” he trailed off, overcome with the endless possibilities. His grandparents might be alive; Scorpius’ mum.

“Don’t go getting any more Ideas; I think we’d had our fill of reality hopping.” Scorpius warned, half teasing.

But Albus’ mind continued to reel with the impossibilities. “What if there’s a universe without magic?” he added with a horrified gasp.

“Do you mean: what if you were a muggle?”

“No, I mean what if there was a universe where magic never existed?”

Scorpius pondered for a moment before concluding, “Not possible.”

He sounded so sure of himself that Albus craned his neck to get a better look at his face. The lilac light of near dawn gave Scorpius’ face a gentle pink glow. His white blond hair was swept back off his forehead, looking almost golden in the strange half-light.

“How can you be sure?”

“There’s always magic somewhere,” Scorpius said, thinking of the star map in Albus’ phone, the mischievous glint that appeared in Albus’ eyes before he announced another Idea, the workings of fate which had brought them together in that train carriage. “You just have to know where to look for it.”

A strange pull thrummed in Albus’ chest. He stared at Scorpius, at the strong sweep of his jawline and the powerful lines of his neck. When had they become so defined? Since when did Albus care? Always. He realised with familiar satisfaction settling in his stomach – it was like finally perfecting an incantation and watching the charm take flight before his eyes, or figuring out a line of sudoku and having the rest of the numbers fall into place.

He loved Scorpius. He’d always loved Scorpius.

He found himself reaching across and planting a soft, chaste kiss against Scorpius’ lips.

Scorpius tensed, his breath hitched. For a moment Albus fear that he would recoil, but after a terrifying, heart stopping moment, he reciprocated.

“That’s definitely new.” Scorpius whispered softly, lips still a fraction from Albus’.

“Do we do that?”  Albus asked, following their script with a smile, sure from the way Scorpius had kissed him that he knew the answer.

“Yes.” Scorpius grinned, rolling over to kiss Albus again. “We definitely do.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr!](http://trenchcoatsandtimetravel.tumblr.com/)


End file.
